Jesus' Upside-Down World

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:14-21, The Last Judgment 36 (see below)
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John 3:16 is probably the world’s most famous Bible passage. It is beautiful and it is comforting to consider the great love of God, and what that means that God will do for us.  But like all passages removed from their context, they perhaps take on a greater or fuller meaning when understood in their entire surroundings.  In this case, we can’t really understand verse 3:16 fully without understanding what Jesus is up to with verse 3:14, how he is using the idea of being “lifted up” and how that relates to the concept of “believing.”

So, that means we must dive in to this very strange to us story of the serpents and the Children of Israel.  This short anecdote occurs in a cluster to anecdotes around the time of the death of Moses.  If we recall, after escaping slavery in Egypt the Children of Israel soon began to complain, and wish for a return to Egypt. So, God instructed them to wander the wilderness for 40 years, so that the complaining and petulant generation would die out and the new generation might proceed with the conquest of Canaan. Even Moses himself would not live to see the promised land. This story of the serpents occurs during the transition time between generations, between the old and the new.

What we translate as poisonous serpents were really more a mythical flying serpent-like creatures called “seraphim” that had a long history in Jewish Temple iconography.  Their name comes from the Hebrew word “to burn” and they were “filled with the fire of divine holiness,” the purpose of which was to purify more often than it was to kill. Thus, these creatures had a two-fold character: to both punish and to heal. And so here in this story, we see them providing both the poison and the antidote.

Now of course, from a Swedenborgian perspective, we don’t subscribe the idea that God would ever purposefully send something harmful to us, even if it were to teach us an important lesson. That’s not how we understand God’s divine love to work. In ancient times, humanity’s understanding of God (or a patheon of gods) put God behind all events in the world; from macro events like politics and victory in battle to micro events like sickness and famine. But even as we acknowledge the ways this worldview was evolving, a deeper sense is clearly apparent in the text. Jesus drew out the idea that the seraphim embodied; that looking upon something that brings us death, both actually and metaphorically, can also bring life. This idea is at the heart of the cross, and at the heart of Jesus’ courageous life.  And Jesus had to explain this many times to many people because it is deeply deeply counter-intuitive.

One of the people that Jesus tried to explain this to was Nicodemus the Pharisee.  Our John reading for today comes down right in the middle of the conversation that they were having together.  Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, has been keeping an eye on Jesus.  He knows something important is happening with Jesus but he doesn’t understand the whole picture.  So, under the cover of night he seeks Jesus out, wanting to know more. Jesus tries to explain to him the importance of being “born again,” that we must relinquish our own selfish ways of thinking and allow ourselves to be remade in God’s image, but Nicodemus has trouble understanding. 

Probably because he is talking to a Pharisee, an educated scholar of the Torah, Jesus uses the story of the serpents as a way to try to explain being born again, as a metaphor for what he is trying to explain: that which causes our selfhood pain can also heal.  Jesus’ explanation hinges on the double meaning of the greek word hypsoo meaning both “lifted up” and “exalted.”  Yes, the Son of Man must be lifted up high on the cross, literally nailed to it, and this will cause his physical death, a criminal’s death, in an extremely humiliating and public way, but in doing so he will also be exalted, meaning he will increase in stature and meaning and importance. That which would kill him would also lead to resurrection. Can we stop for a moment to consider how ridiculous this must have sounded? Just imagine the very worst humiliation that could ever happen to you?  Do you have it in mind?  Perhaps, like me, you found your heart involuntarily beating a little bit faster just contemplating it.  But now imagine someone telling you that this humiliation will be the very best moment of your life? Um, no. Pass. That is definitely not going to be the case, we say, it will likely be my very worst moment.  Right?  We absolutely resist this idea.

And yet, some of the most powerful personal experiences can be understood in this way.  We’ve heard many times from addicts in recovery, for example, that the moment that they hit rock bottom was the best and most important moment of their life. It seems hard to imagine it felt that way to them at the time, but in retrospect they see how it changed them, how it allowed them to ultimately re-make their life.  And isn’t this the exact purpose of the seraphim to which Jesus is referring?  The divine fire might be painful whilst it is purifying us, but submitting to it ultimately brings us to healing.

And thus, Jesus work in the world rests heavily on this kind of irony…that which appears to us one way is not necessarily so, and in fact, might be the opposite of what we think. The cross, which appears to kill, actually gives life, just as the seraphim which appeared to harm, also provided the healing. Jesus is preaching an upside-down world, one that has hope in it where we would never expect it, and thank goodness, for this world is often very bleak as it is.

So this upside-down-ness, this counter-intuitiveness, is intimately connected to what it means to “believe.” In this context, believing does not mean so much an intellectual assent to a set of principles, or even believing strongly that what we are told in the gospels actually happened.  Believing here means believing in the meaning of Jesus’ life and the cross, that the meaning put forth by these events is the meaning that is the most true, useful and productive way to understand the reality of the whole universe. And naturally, we live our lives, consciously or unconsciously according that how we understand the reality of things.  So in this context, belief is really more about trust and loyalty than intellectual belief, about the meaning to which we will consistently conform our lives.  So let’s try hearing the bible quotes this way…“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever trusts in that kind of giving God shall not perish but have eternal life,” or “whoever lives a life loyal to that principle of love and sacrifice may have eternal life in him.”  This is a type of belief that we must give ourselves over to completely, that structures our entire life.  It is not enough to just say “I assent” because that requires nothing of us. This type of belief contains within it a desire to re-make every aspect of our lives according to it because we trust and have confidence in the fact that it represents God’s truest reality.  Belief in Jesus is basically a choice to live in a world in which evil, sin, death, brokenness and hate do not have the last word because we have faith that they can be vanquished and/or transformed, and then living as if that were already true. 

So, what does this mean for us then, in the season of Lent?  Well, it actually underpins our whole purpose for the season.  Lent is time for putting aside our normal ways of doing and thinking in order to see Jesus upside-down world more clearly.  Any Lenten practices that we might undertake of denying ourselves or disrupting our habits is not about punishment but about giving ourselves over to the irony.  One of my classmates at seminary shaved her head during Lent, to disrupt her normal sense of vanity so that she might learn something new about her essential worthiness.  Another person I know once challenged herself to contact her representatives in congress everyday, disrupting her sense that she has no power, learning that her voice can matter. Others might give up sugar or fast in another way, disrupting a crutch that seems indispensible, but learning that they are stronger and more whole than they thought.

These are simple ways remind ourselves of Jesus upside-down world, to say that we trust that God will show us something new in an uncomfortable experience that we would normally avoid. Because, let’s face it, when we are trusting only ourselves we would take one look the cross and say no thanks, of course we would. God certainly does not expect us to relish suffering. But perhaps instead we can take a breath and stop for a moment and realize that we are not the arbiter of righteousness, we are not the arbiter of the right-ness of experience, we are not the arbiter of what can be transformative, God is.

Now Swedenborg would probably not describe this all in same terms that I have (I was trained at a Lutheran seminary after all!)  He was too much of a scientist to naturally want to describe the world as needing to be upside-down, or to have much appreciation for irony in a literary sense. But especially in spiritual and psychological terms he would agree…we need to invert the order of the things that we love so that we might conform ourselves to an image of heaven.  We are born, and we are taught, to love ourselves and our power, and the world and its power.  And those loves, in proportion, can be good.  But only as long as they are subordinated to loving God and loving other people.  And the way that we get to loving God and other people, especially when we have habitually loved only our selves and the world, is to truly believe and enact the fact that all life and love is from the Lord.  When we believe that, when we live that, then we will learn to question our selfishness, our priorities, and our thinking, because we will truly value God’s judgement and love above our own.  And that process, regeneration, will turn our loves and our lives upside down.

The cross, and the whole of Jesus life, reminds us that the world’s understanding of things, our natural understanding of things, might not be right.  In the cross, in the incarnation, God begs for us to look at the world upside-down, sideways and inside out so that we don’t miss what we are supposed to be learning, so we don’t miss chances to see and experience beauty and transformation where we didn’t expect it.  In Lent especially, we are invited to walk through the world a little askance so that we might see resurrection, so that we might see the image of heaven.  For God loved the world, and us, so very much, that God embodied an incredible physical and spiritual reversal, so we might always be reminded to look at things sideways, to trust and believe in God’s revealing above all else.

Amen.


Readings:

Numbers 21:4-9

4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!” 6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

John 3:14-21

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

The Last Judgment 36

[1]…It is assumed that faith exists so long as the church's teachings are believed, so that it is with those who believe. But believing by itself is not faith, only willing and doing what is believed is faith. When the church's teachings are merely believed, they do not enter into the way a person lives, but only into their memory and so into what the external person thinks. They only enter into their way of life when they enter into their will and thus their actions; that is when their spirit is first engaged. For a person's spirit, the life of which is what a person's life really is, is formed by their will, and only by their thinking to the extent that this arises from their will. A person's memory and the thinking which arises from this is merely the entrance through which the introduction is effected. 

[3] …Faith is an affection for truth arising from willing what is true because it is true, for this is the real spiritual element in a person. It is far removed from the natural, which is willing what is true not for its own sake, but to get for oneself glory, fame and gain...So willing what is true because it is true is also acknowledging and loving the Divine; these two things are so closely linked that in heaven they are looked on as one…faith is not just believing, but also willing and doing, so there can be no faith if there is no charity. Charity or love is willing and doing.